Friday, March 19, 2010

A Taste of Second Life comes to the Cahners ComputerPlace at the Museum of Science, Boston

I am pleased to announce my latest project - to design a digital/virtual art exhibit for the Cahners Computer Place at the Museum of Science, Boston . The exhibit will further visitors' understanding of digital image creation and manipulation (http://www.marthavista.com/). It will also introduce people to the idea of making virtual art. The physical design of the exhibit will be an immersive installation employing sound and video projection to simulate the experience of being inside one of the immersive art environments that I create as an avatar named Alizarin Goldflake in Second Life (R), a virtual reality platform.

The picture above shows the latest SL mock-up of the design for the exhibit's visitor-interaction area. The kiosk in the center is an easy interactive - it allows the visitor to select various colored underpaintings for an upper layer containing a black-and-transparent digital drawing comprised of lines and tones.

The kiosk on the left provides the visitor with graphic elements to assemble into a finished digital collage, introducing the aesthetic decision-making process.

The most difficult interactive on the right will allow the visitor to experiment with a digital drawing program and with a virtual reality environment, using Open Sim local.

The backdrop to the kiosks is a video of Alizarin's SL immersive art, "The Maze," and it is framed by panels displaying two of her digital collages. The mock-up of this proposed visitor-interaction area can be found in Second Life at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lie/205/175/1201

The overall proposed exhibit, “Digital Art – Martha Jane Bradford,” may also include some or all of the following: a display of framed digital drawings with wall text explaining various aspects of creating digital drawings and collages, framed SL photos of Alizarin's immersive art, LCD screen presentations, videos of virtual art displays in Alizarin's SL studio, pod casts, video casts, and live demonstrations. An introduction to virtual reality via Open Sim is also being considered.